Daily Current Affairs 10 March 2018

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7 years ago

Hello and welcome to exampundit. Here are the Daily Current Affairs of March 10, 2018. These are important for the upcoming SBI Clerk Examination.

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Economy & Banking

India, France ink 14 MoUs in key sectors

India and France on Saturday signed 14 agreements in key sectors in an effort to bolster the bilateral relations between the two sides.

List of MoUs/Agreements

An agreement was signed on the prevention of illicit consumption and reduction of illicit traffic in narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances and chemical precursors and related offences.
An agreement on India-France Migration and Mobility Partnership was signed between the two sides.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between India and France to facilitate mutual recognition of academic qualifications.
A MoU between the Ministry of Railways and SNCF Motilities of France on technical cooperation was also signed in the field of railways.
A Letter of Intent between India and France was signed for the creation of a permanent Indo-French Railways Forum.
An agreement was signed between India and France regarding the provision of reciprocal logistics support between their country’s armed forces.
A MoU between India and France on cooperation in the field of environment. It aims to establish a basis for the exchange of information between the Governments and technical experts of the two countries in the field of environment and climate change.
An agreement between India and France was signed on the cooperation in the field of sustainable urban development.
An agreement between India and France was signed regarding the exchange and reciprocal protection of classified or protected information.
An Implementing arrangement between Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Central National D’EtudesSpatiales (CNES) was signed by India and France for pre-formulation studies of a maritime awareness mission.
An industrial way forward agreement between Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited and EDF, France was signed by the two sides.
A bilateral arrangement between India and France was signed on cooperation in the matter of hydrography and maritime cartography.
A credit facility agreement between India and France of 100 million euros was signed by India and France for funding of the Smart City projects.
A MoU between National Institute of Solar Energy (NISE) and Ministry of New and Renewable Energy and the National Solar Energy Institute (INES), France was signed between the two sides.

SpiceJet inks $12.5 billion deal with Safran for aircraft engines

SpiceJet has finalised $ 12.5 billion contract for LEAP-1B engines to power its fleet of 155 Boeing 737 Max planes.
The agreement which covers ten-year rate per flight hour agreement and spare engines was signed on Saturday on the sidelines of French president Emmanuel Macron’s India visit. LEAP-1B engines are manufactured by CFM International, a part of Safran group of France and are the sole engine variant for the 737 Max planes.
Last January, the airline ordered Boeing 737 Max planes in $ 22 billion deal. SpiceJet expects to receive the first aircraft from the order in August and another 14 by next April.
Under the terms of the agreement, CFM guarantees maintenance costs for all SpiceJet’s LEAP-1B engines on a pay by hour basis.

French rail giant Alstom inks USD 92 million supply deal with India metro firms

French rail giant Alstom on Saturday said it had inked a deal to supply three Indian companies running metro train services in Mumbai, Jaipur and Chennai.
Valued at 75 million euros ($92 million), the deal was announced as French President Emmanuel Macron began his first official visit to India since being elected last year.
Under terms of the agreement, Alstom will supply power to the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation and the Jaipur Metro Rail Corporation, both government-run companies, as well as providing trains to the Chennai Metro Rail Corporation.
In 2015, Alstom won a 3.5-billion-euro contract to supply India’s national rail operator with 800 electric locomotives in one of the French group’s biggest-ever projects.
Alstom, which is due to merge its rail activities with those of German industrial giant Siemens to create a European rail giant, said it had completed construction of its first locomotive on time, with assembly carried out at its new plant in eastern Bihar state.

Appointments

Commerce min Suresh Prabhu assigned additional charge of Civil Aviation ministry

Two days after Telugu Desam Party’s (TDP) Ashok Gajapathi Raju stepped down from the position of Civil Aviation Minister, the portfolio was handed over to Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu.
Suresh Prabhu has been assigned with the additional charge of the Civil Aviation Ministry.
Suresh Prabhu had stepped down from the designation of Minister of Union Railways in 2017 and was given the charge of Commerce and Industry ministry while Railways was alloted to Piyush Goyal.
The President accepted the resignation of two TDP ministers from their posts in the Central government.
Two Union Ministers, Ashok Gajapathi Raju and YS Chowdary, have submitted their resignations to the Prime Minister on Thursday evening following the TDP supremo and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu’s announcement.

Twitter appoints IIT-Bombay alumnus Parag Agrawal as new CTO

Microblogging platform Twitter has appointed Parag Agrawal as its chief technology officer, according to an update on the company’s website.
Agrawal, an alumnus of IIT-Bombay and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, succeeds Adam Messinger.
Messinger had left the organisation in late 2016.
As the CTO, Agrawal is “leading technical strategy for the company and overseeing machine learning and AI across our product and infrastructure teams”, as per information available on Twitter’s website.
Agrawal had joined Twitter in 2011 as an Ads Engineer and has since then led efforts on scaling Ads systems, as well as creating and deploying a platform for online machine learning.

India

Supreme Court allows Passive Euthanasia and Living Will with strict guidelines

Recognising right to die with dignity as a fundamental right, the Supreme Court (SC) on March 9, 2018 ruled that the passive euthanasia and advance ‘living will’ are permissible.
The ruling was given by a five-judge Constitution Bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AK Sikri, AM Khanwilkar, DY Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan.
The apex court ruled that individuals can draft a living will specifying that they shall not be put on life support, if they undergo an incurable coma in the future.
A person can make a statement in advance that his life should not be prolonged by putting him on a ventilator or an artificial support system.
The judges gave four separate opinions, however, all of them were unanimous that a ‘living will’ should be allowed as individual should not be allowed to continue suffering in a vegetative state.
Living will is a written document that allows a patient to give explicit instructions in advance about the medical treatment to be administered when he or she is terminally ill.
The bench also gave strict guidelines for carrying out the mandate of a ‘living will’, by specifying who is authorised to give effect to the will.
It called for the involvement of a medical board to determine whether the patient in a vegetative state could be revived or not.
Considering the property disputes, the court ruled that relatives of a patient, who has not written a ‘living will’, can approach High Courts, asking for passive euthanasia.

Obituaries

Nobel winner scientist John Sulston, who decoded human genome, dies at 75

John Sulston, a Nobel Prize-winning British scientist who helped decode the human genome, has died. He was 75. The Wellcome Sanger Institute, the successor to the cutting-edge genomic research centre he once founded and directed, confirmed today that Sulston had died but did not say when or give the cause of death.
Sulston shared the prize in 2002 for his contribution to work in unraveling how genes control cell division. He traced the adult nematode worm, C. elegans, to decipher how cells divide and create something new findings the institute said were key to understanding how cancers develop.
In 1992, Sulston was appointed director of the Sanger Center, established at Cambridge to spearhead the British contribution to the international Human Genome Project.
He shared the Nobel Prize for medicine with Brenner and Robert Horvitz for their work.
At the time of his death, he was the chairman of the Institute of Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, where he researched the relationship between scientists and society.

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This post was last modified on March 11, 2018 12:07 am